Night Soul and Other Stories (12 page)

“A ‘friend,’ you said.”

“‘An athlete?’ he said. ‘Architect,’ I did say. Then he said he could recommend someone, a regular little terrorist—” “What did he mean?”

“Strict.”

“That she saw through him maybe.” A Chinese woman emerged from the lavatory. “How undressed are you for the treatment?” “Shorts.” “Prone?” “On my back.” What had the guy been wearing? Army jacket camo. The correspondent didn’t like something. “Something else,” he said. “Where were you when you had that flat?”

A good reporter, the correspondent knew the street, the block, the highway. “Strange,” he said. The thought came to Xides again that he must have been recognized that night.

What was he doing there? said his friend.

“A breath of air?”

The correspondent set off into the aisle, touching a seat back with his free hand to steady himself, entering the shadowy sleep of the cabin, polite about what he hadn’t been told obviously. But how
had
the other man come to be out there in the dark street, the cobbles, the light rain, two in the morning?

Mother was half-Greek, Xides told the flight attendant, he had never been until he got married.

“Diana” produced from a metal drawer another bottle of water for him. So he was thinking of taking his wife up to the Acropolis?

Not exactly.

“You can see that,” she said.

The
scene
? he said with his eyes, frowning, wondering what she wanted.

So it was Bob Whey. Bob Whey had thought to run into Xides at the Materials show and had run into someone who’d written about him.

Bob Whey had recommended an acupuncturist, figuring it was Xides who would hear.

At Customs they asked Sam to open his case. “How ‘bout those other calls?” he said. “Same guy thirty minutes was it into the appointment?”

“You been talking to Eva.”

Starting to tap in a phone number at the airport, he stopped. If he were younger, she older. It had been three days shy of three weeks. At his doorstep, key in the lock, he still hadn’t phoned. How to see what was going on. Yellow Pages. Ladder. That difficult man she was back with who loved her. Loved something about her.

New life, new strategy inevitably developing. What was it, where was it? City not the site of, but the very medium of—what war this time?

It was another day and he phoned his internist and topped his bike tires up and got himself across the Bridge to Brooklyn to visit the compressed straw paneling in a new auditorium of his and the exposed recycled steel Smartbeams for one suspended mezzanine floor. His daughter at her college in Ohio did not take an interest in this old school she had commuted to as a child, cabbed and subwayed by him at seven-thirty in the beginning. A year later put on the bus, and as they pulled away at the window talking to her friend, her father standing out on the curb almost but not quite ignored. And now he had been consulted again about the sustainable “green” building at her college—which she kept her distance from—his part in it.

A sketch reformulating the position of a hundred and fifty sensors which were not even his job, constantly monitoring flows of energy, cyclings of matter. To reweave the human presence was how they put it that he had been asked to advise on, but later an equation had come to him like Nervi’s parabola and bare, sincere roofs, prefab beams, salt warehouse and Naval Academy swimming pool to beget another equation. Xides despaired of his own thoughts. When would she stop changing her major? It had been music; would it be again? He was tied up in double deadlines with cash value people were phoning about. The fish farming reservoir shapes networked for sluiced storm-water the filters didn’t yet quite track. Proud, though, of a high-end commune in eastern Washington, where his single-wall structures convey recycled light with this new water so far an industrial secret.

Warmed by the great skylight, she might have been clocking him, lap after lap, the Asian in the deck chair with next to nothing on, a passing plane aglint far away, when he stood up at the shallow end and felt her dark glasses at once beamed away from him. She was knitting—and young, her very thighs thinking at this moment; and not a resident, he felt. He placed her. Designer? Chemist? What was it coming to him, a movie theater lobby two nights ago he was certain; yet, now he thought of it, also lab offices at Einstein in the Bronx where, on his way to the caf in the next building over—a prolific little cactus, its pads and joints overflowing the pot and pausing to rest on a formica desk top to make their way along and rising like uncanny structure in motion, suppliant, stubborn, succulent—she’d been behind him as he left the Mag Res building with half the equation.

He pushed off for four more lengths of the pool, Sam not showing maybe, something happening here to Xides, Xides letting it, his back supple deep inside. Three schoolboys, two skinny, one fat, arrived from school here at a serene, serious mid-Manhattan rooftop club, were getting horsey at the edge as he made his turn at the far end. Until, halfway down, he was not moving but, face down, arms stretched like a diver’s, he might have been thought knocked dead by this explosion of plunging boys coming himself to rest eyes open into five feet of water luminous with particles, absorbing under the surface the violent ring of cries from the kids shoving and killing each other as he had felt their plunge shift the volumes about him, and his hearing; felt approach his eyes through refracted glimmer a saving lure but he saw it was also
in
his eyes too, atoms there stunned to note the water mobilizing certain thousands of those (
sun
-saving) bacteria (at his bidding even?) that make chains of crystals inside them into magnets to point themselves toward the pole, light’s very shadow.

A second explosion acoustical and dreamed by the water that filled his ears signaled in both of them not just the boys bombing the adjacent lane and the woman up on her feet (for in a corner of his eye he saw below her belly button her tiny bikini bottom’s waist and crotch practically converging—as his body the morning of Hutong could be subject to surveillance but not his half-lost vague thought of architect assembling solitary before Grace found him) before he himself brought his feet down now onto pool bottom like a tuck starting a back flip and reared, water pouring off his shoulders, startling the boys, surging over to hoist himself out, find his towel and flip open his cell five days home from China, though he had biked past Valerie’s early in the morning, run a red light hearing the doorman’s call behind him, and hoping the acupuncturist hadn’t been expecting his phone call, heard that thought given the lie now at poolside by, to his amazed dripping ear, the 617 number you were invited to leave messages at by a woman’s voice whose every word sounded like a beginning, as exact as an idea might be good and also vague, like low wood structures in the old courtyards of the Hutong, the settled strength of peanut oil frying, the half-baked idea he returned there for.

617 was Boston.

She had moved. He had been in China. His gaze reached that far but the Asian woman across the pool believed it was her he saw, and he said, above his cell, “Mag Res building” meaningless words above his cell for her to read or some bugger listening in to hear, water riding off his skin, his towel around his neck male and executive, several places at once, probing the woman in the glasses. And suspecting surveillance and hoping to see his friend at any moment, he recalled our own projection of the insides of the dam and almost regretted missing acupuncture the day before his flight to China because his daughter had needed him just at that hour.

To meet her at the bank (she was so busy). It wasn’t money. Was it just him she wanted? Though he brought money up. Which made her mad all over again. Really because the “older” boyfriend (whom she knew her father didn’t like—Hey, check it out) had decided that at twenty-seven he needed some space. It had started the night her dad had come to dinner, she told him. Then later they took a walk and bickered about the dinner and heard that explosion and had an argument about it, lights on in the windows of an apartment house they passed (“And it started to rain?” he said, and his daughter so fine in her wretchedness, which would pass, looked at him sharply—Yes, she had looked up into the rain, she
liked
rain, and people at their windows she took them in at that instant and for some reason wished she could have phoned her dad but by then he was somewhere on the bike path racing downtown and she had Mom’s hat that old floppy job in her hand and put it on, and her companion said,
Your shoes
(meaning, Why do you wear those heels?), and she stopped and had a look.

And giving her father a nice afternoon peck on the lips, a few words like all her little habits stayed with him as they parted after exactly (he could not bring himself to say it to her) forty-four minutes, “Not going back
there
,” was what Viv said with all that sweeping subtlety yet to be lived into, for he had heard himself saying those words once to someone.

So it was for his daughter that he had let the Friday acupuncture appointment go with a phone message. He would see Valerie when he came back from China but was on his way, she should know, to finding himself a Recycled Man. In which, as he recognized it at once as a lie, or an attempted one, there spread from chest to scalp, brain to instep its material truth as well.

Xides on the far side of the pool went to greet Sam in his street clothes with the palm of his free hand raised but the Asian woman had gathered up her magazines and vanished into the ladies’ locker room, leaving Xides with suddenly the full equation of how architecture out of your very body puts together times.

“You see that?” A shadowy band like a line drawn with a broad chisel-tip pencil enlarged with a cartoonist’s water brush was what the doctor pointed to on the luminous screen. “That’s a second lesion on top of the first which would have scared us with your back you now tell me about, if this second hadn’t appeared, but it looks like—(can you beat that?) no telling when, but…”

“Like what?” There’d been no reason to do the test, take these pictures, except the patient’s faith in some fly-by-night acupuncturist’s opinion, but…

“We’re seeing a second lesion which sets off this, this growth. That’s new organ we’re looking at. Kidney. Come back in four weeks. Damn.”

“Damn?”

“’Zif you’d had liver surgery.”

The correspondent knew the Asian woman but not from the pool. She was attached to the Chinese consulate.

Xides’ back seemed better. His daughter had long ago inherited his early rising. Now he had inherited her early-to-bed.

A couple passed. The woman on her cell.

Xides called the 617: “You were on the phone that night of the explosion, it was out on the North River, I could tell, and you were at the window looking down into the street, and a girl—a young woman—walking by looked up. It was raining and you were on the phone and she put on her hat. You said something to the guy on the other end of the phone, and he hung up on you. True?”

The correspondent did his homework. He remembered what you said. And he knew his man. The chemistry of materials and the melancholy wonder that they are us.

The metropolitan form in Africa (Xides would quote someone whose name he’d forgotten), reveals itself through its fugitive discontinuities. Look at Joburg. The unconscious of a city. Strata, residues, layers become provisional, precarious, in times of…what was the word?

“That boy who was arrested when you landed in Durban?”

“He was behind me, with the woman, the major who’d intervened to forestall something potentially incorrect the boy was on the way to saying.”

And on the tarmac you were welcomed.

“They took him in by another door while I was shaking hands with a couple of…I called to the major, who…the boy stopped and looked over his shoulder, people taking him by the arm, I hailed him, I don’t know what I said, I
don’t know
.”

And he?

“Words of mine. To the effect that—”

To the what?

“—‘urban design becomes repression,’ he cried out, I think, and was hustled away—‘architecture,’ I heard, ‘fantasy,’ I think, ‘the city becomes’—”

The acupuncturist had said a month ago she could imagine what came next.

Xides had made a fuss, been stunned, had inquired, and it was explained to him, and he wanted to cancel his appearance but didn’t.

In the evening Valerie’s return message was waiting for him, her voice more for him at first than the words: “It was a floppy hat…and she took it off right after she put it on and kicked one leg out as if to show her foot, and she looked up into the rain. At my building, I think. And she stopped and the guy she was with kept walking. And she stood there and turned and walked in the other direction.”

The metropolis becomes the place where, across warped space, the superfluity of objects is converted into a value in itself, the correspondent had put down. X he had called a “mystery man…interrogating self-doublingly”—a phrase cut by the editor at
The Economist
in favor of direct quoting.

Xides stopped to say Hi to Nuevo. What had Nuevo called out to him when he was on his bike day before yesterday?

“They left this.” A taped-closed shopping bag, double-bagged with
XIDES
in white gel ink on a black Post-it. “They did?” It was sort of heavy and you felt a subtle balance. He saw the green light of Valerie’s machine in the waiting eye of the doorman. The infinitely small appointment book with handwriting to match. Smaller and smaller, seeing then but a corner of it. This between them an angle an algorithm could turn back into the whole thing, like a sliver of kidney his whole body and more. Valerie would not have left the package.

Clea was there when he opened it. It was the binnacle compass, gimbal-mounted and of some value. You trip over it, you win it. He would not go back there. He could not think of another message to leave. He had told Valerie nobody had fired her. He had said,
You don’t go back there,
and she had said,
You don’t.
She had taken his advice in a form he now saw had always been there.